Computer networks may typically include a plurality of servers that can host data and provide services to multiple clients or organizations. The clients or organizations can use these services or data to power a wide variety of workloads such as storage, data processing and warehousing, web and mobile applications, archive and many other tasks. Generally, clients request services or data from a host system and the host system responds by executing certain tasks to service the request and/or provide the data over the network.
The data may often be transferred as packets. In some instances, a pipeline may be implemented to process the packets. However, in conventional packet processing systems, the pipeline to process the packets may not be flexible or scalable. For example, if a pipeline is implemented in hardware (e.g., as an integrated circuit), the pipeline may not be altered easily once the hardware is fabricated. In addition, while the packets are flowing through the pipeline, any access to shared memories may slow down the performance of the system as well as bandwidth of the memories available for other tasks. This may result in reduced throughput of the system.